Animatronic Terrors: Five Nights At Freddy's 2

Let’s all be quite clear about one thing: I am still young and cool and vibrant. Good. Obviously I know about all the cool things young people like myself are up to, and those small jumpscare horror games we all enjoy with our cool friends. Slender Man is so 2012, SCP games are over, and creepypasta hacks were too goofy to ever catch on. No, now we’re all into Five Nights at Freddy’s and being a night watchman stalked by horrifying animatronic animals come to life to murder you. Or they were a few months ago. We were. Us. Me too. Oh I don’t know, I just don’t know any more.

To recap: Five Nights at Freddy’s is about surviving the night in a grotty Chuck E. Cheese-y kids’ restraurant where the eerie animatronic animals have come to life and want to murder you. They can’t move when watched, so you sit in an office, frantically flicking through security cameras, trying to keep an eye on these frozen horrors and judging when to use your limited power supply to lock doors. If they get in, boo! it’s jumpscare curtains for you.

You can’t lock doors in the sequel. That’s gone. What you can do, instead, is slip on an empty head of old Freddy Fazbear himself and hope they’ll be fooled by the disguise. I’m sure that won’t have terrible consequences. Five Nights 2 is trying to sneak into through Steam Greenlight, which I’m sure it’s qualified for by now because the first is so remarkably popular.

At least 421,000 Five Nights-related videos are on YouTube. The Greenlight page gained 1500 comments in about 16 hours. Almost 200 posts speculate about whether the mask will be overpowered or not. I may be a dreadful spinster too wrapped up in Melvyn Bragg’s Bookshelf Reorganiser 2014 to play it myself, but I see the appeal. It’s short, unpleasant bursts that give similar but unique “And then…!” stories to tell your chums the next day (or vlog — do the youths still say “vlog”?) and surely also opportunities to tell little lies about secrets you’ve ‘discovered’.